Together, these findings suggest an important point: while visually and quantitatively depicting participants' network polarization (Viz+Ideo) enhances their belief in the extent to which they live in a political echo chamber, supplementing this with recommendations for people to follow actually produces the opposite effect — and even leads participants to indicate they are less-inclined to want to have a conversation with someone from the other side of the political aisle. As recent work has suggested, the choice of account recommendations affects the extent to which political polarization and “controversy” decrease on platforms like Twitter [1]}. Therefore, under alternative recommendation schemes — e.g. not seeking to maximize connection diversity — our findings might differ.
